More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby, and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn’t know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.
Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn’t him.
‘But the plans were on display…’ ‘On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.’ ‘That’s the display department.’ ‘With a torch.’ ‘Ah, well the lights had probably gone.’ ‘So had the stairs.’ ‘But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.’
Mr Prosser thought it sounded perfectly potty. ‘That sounds perfectly reasonable…’ he said in a reassuring tone of voice, wondering who he was trying to reassure.
‘Three pints?’ said Arthur. ‘At lunchtime?’ The man next to Ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. He said, ‘Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.’
‘This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer, ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.’
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things so say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.
What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
‘Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.’
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
‘This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,’ the voice continued. ‘As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.’
‘There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.’
By this time somebody somewhere must have manned a radio transmitter, located a wavelength and broadcast a message back to the Vogon ships, to plead on behalf of the planet. Nobody ever heard what they said, they only heard the reply. The PA slammed back into life again. The voice was annoyed. It said: ‘What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? For Heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light-years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that’s your own lookout.’ ‘Energize the demolition beams.’ Light poured out of the hatchways.
...more
It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the Presidency, a decision which had sent shock waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy – Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President? Many had seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas.
Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.
The President in particular is very much a figurehead – he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had – he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.
Vogons suffered no illusions as to the regard their works were generally held in. Their early attempts at composition had been part of a bludgeoning insistence that they be accepted as a properly evolved and cultured race, but now the only thing that kept them going was sheer bloodymindedness.
‘You know,’ said Arthur, ‘it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.’ ‘Why, what did she tell you?’ ‘I don’t know, I didn’t listen.’
(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the fact that the fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your bodyweight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt.)
Five wild Event Maelstroms swirled in vicious storms of unreason and spewed up a pavement. On the pavement lay Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent gulping like half-spent fish. ‘There you are,’ gasped Ford, scrabbling for a finger-hold on the pavement as it raced through the Third Reach of the Unknown, ‘I told you I’d think of something.’ ‘Oh sure,’ said Arthur, ‘sure.’ ‘Bright idea of mine,’ said Ford, ‘to find a passing spaceship and get rescued by it.’ The real universe arched sickeningly away beneath them. Various pretend ones flitted silently by, like mountain goats. Primal light exploded,
...more
The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as ‘Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun To Be With’. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as ‘a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes’, with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.
One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so – but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the act. He preferred people to be
...more
Slowly, with great loathing, he stepped towards the door, like a hunter stalking his prey. Suddenly it slid open. ‘Thank you,’ it said, ‘for making a simple door very happy.’ Deep in Marvin’s thorax gears ground. ‘Funny,’ he intoned funereally, ‘how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.’
Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward amongst the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before – and thus was the Empire forged.
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, whose
...more
That’s it! That’s a good name – ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was, Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
‘O Deep Thought Computer,’ he said, ‘the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us…’ he paused ‘…the Answer!’ ‘The Answer?’ said Deep Thought. ‘The Answer to what?’ ‘Life!’ urged Fook. ‘The Universe!’ said Lunkwill. ‘Everything!’ they said in chorus. Deep Thought paused for a moment’s reflection.
‘Terribly unfortunate,’ he said, ‘a diode blew in one of the life-support computers. When we tried to revive our cleaning staff we discovered they’d been dead for nearly thirty thousand years. Who’s going to clear away the bodies, that’s what I want to know.
‘But it was the Great Question! The Universe Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!’ howled Loonquawl. ‘Yes,’ said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, ‘but what actually is it?’ A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other. ‘Well, you know, it’s just Everything…Everything…’ offered Phouchg weakly. ‘Exactly!’ said Deep Thought. ‘So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.’
‘You know,’ said Arthur thoughtfully, ‘all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.’ ‘No,’ said the old man, ‘that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.’ ‘Everyone?’ said Arthur. ‘Well, if everyone has that perhaps it means something! Perhaps somewhere outside the Universe we know…’ ‘Maybe. Who cares?’ said Slartibartfast before Arthur got too excited.
‘Now,’ said Benjy mouse, ‘to business.’ Ford and Zaphod clinked their glasses together. ‘To business!’ they said. ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Benjy. Ford looked round. ‘Sorry, I thought you were proposing a toast,’ he said.
